Numbers in the Dark and Other Stories (17 page)

What will the human race be at the moment of its extinction? A certain quantity of information about itself and the world, a finite quantity, given that it will no longer be able to propagate itself and grow. For a certain time, the universe enjoyed an excellent opportunity to gather and elaborate information; and to create it, to bring forth information there where in other circumstances there would have been no one to inform and nothing to inform them about: such was life on earth, and above all human life, its memory, its inventions for communicating and remembering. Our organization can guarantee that this body of information not be lost, regardless of whether it is actually passed on to others or not. The duty of the director is to make sure that nothing is left out, because what is left out is as if it had never been. At the same time it will also be your duty to treat any element that might end up causing confusion, or obscuring more essential elements, as if it had never been—everything, that is, that rather than increasing the body of information would generate pointless clutter and clatter. What matters is the general model constituted by the whole of our information, from which further information, which we are not giving or perhaps don’t have, may be deduced. In short, by not giving certain kinds of information, one is giving more than one would if one did. The final result of our work will be a model in which everything counts as information, even what isn’t there. Only then will it be possible to say what really mattered out of all that has been, or rather what really was, since the final state of our archive will constitute at once that which is, has been and will be, and all else is nothing.

Of course there are moments in our work—you will have experienced them too, Müller—when one is tempted to imagine that the only things that matter are those which elude our archives, that only what passes without leaving any trace truly exists, while everything held in our records is dead detritus, the left-overs, the waste. The moment comes when a yawn, a buzzing fly, an itch seem the only treasure there is, precisely because completely unusable, occurring once and for all and then promptly forgotten, spared the monotonous destiny of being stored in the world memory. Who could rule out the possibility that the universe consists of the discontinuous network of moments that cannot be recorded, and that our organization does nothing but establish their negative image, a frame around emptiness and meaninglessness.

But the quirk of our profession is this: that as soon as we concentrate on something, we immediately want to include it in our files; with the result, I confess, that I have often found myself cataloguing yawns, pimples, unhelpful associations of ideas, little tunes I’ve whistled, and then hiding them amongst the mass of more useful information. For the position of director which you are about to be offered brings with it this privilege: the right to put one’s personal imprint on the world memory. Please understand me, Müller: I’m not talking about arbitrary liberties or an abuse of power, but of an indispensable element in our work. A mass of coldly objective and incontrovertible information would run the risk of presenting a far from truthful picture, of falsifying what is most specific in any situation. Suppose we received from another planet a message made up of pure facts, facts of such clarity as to be merely obvious: we wouldn’t pay attention, we would hardly even notice; only a message containing something unexpressed, something doubtful and partially indecipherable, would break through the threshold of our consciousness and demand to be received and interpreted. We must bear this in mind: the director’s task is that of giving the whole of the data gathered and selected by our offices that slight subjective slant, that touch of the opinionated, the rash, which it needs in order to be true. That’s what I wanted to warn you about, before handing over: in the material gathered to date you will notice here and there the mark of my own hand—an extremely delicate one, you understand—a sprinkling of appraisals, of facts withheld, even lies.

Only in a superficial sense can lies be said to exclude the truth; you will be aware that in many cases lies—the patient’s lies to the psychoanalyst, for example—are just as revealing as the truth, if not more so; and the same will be true for those who eventually interpret our message. What I’m telling you now, Müller, I’m no longer telling you because instructed to do so by our superiors, but drawing on my own personal experience, speaking as colleague to colleague, man to man. Listen: the lie is the real information we have to pass on. Hence I didn’t wish to deny myself a discreet use of lying where it didn’t complicate the message, but on the contrary simplified it. When it came to information about myself in particular, I felt it legitimate to indulge in all kinds of details that are not true (I don’t see how this could bother anyone). My life with Angela, for example: I described it as I would have liked it to be, a great love story, where Angela and I appear as two eternal lovebirds happy in the midst of every kind of adversity, passionate, faithful. It wasn’t exactly like that, Müller: Angela married me out of convenience and immediately regretted it, our life was one long trail of sourness and subterfuge. But what does it matter what happened day by day? In the world memory Angela’s image is definitive, perfect, nothing can taint it and I will always be the most enviable husband there ever was.

At first all I had to do was to apply some cosmetics to the data our everyday life provided. But there came the point when the facts I found myself confronted with as I watched Angela day by day (then spied on her, finally followed her) became increasingly contradictory and ambiguous, such as to justify the worst suspicions. What was I to do, Müller? Muddy that image of Angela at once so clear, so easy to transmit, so loved and loveable, was I to make it incomprehensible, to darken the most brilliant light in all our archives? I didn’t hesitate, day after day I eliminated these facts. But I was constantly afraid that some clue, some intimation, some hint from which one might deduce what she, what Angela did and was in this transitory life, might still be hovering around her definitive image. I spent the days in the laboratory, selecting, cancelling, omitting. I was jealous, Müller: not jealous of the transitory Angela—that was a game I’d already lost—but jealous of that information-Angela who would live as long as the universe itself.

If the information-Angela was not to be contaminated, the first thing that must be done was to stop the living Angela from constantly superimposing herself on that image. It was then that Angela disappeared and all searches for her proved vain. It would be pointless, Müller, for me to tell you now how I managed to get rid of the body piece by piece. Please, keep calm, these details are of no importance as far as our work is concerned, since in the world memory I remain that happy husband and later inconsolable widower you all know. But this didn’t bring peace of mind: the information-Angela was still part of an information system where certain data might lend themselves to being interpreted—whether because of disturbances in transmission, or some malevolence on the part of the decoder—as ambiguous conjectures, insinuations, slander. I decided to destroy all references to people Angela could have had relationships with. I was sad about that, since there will now be no trace of some of our colleagues in the world memory, it will be as though they had never existed.

You imagine I’m telling you all this in order to seek your complicity, Müller. But that’s not the case. I feel obliged to inform you of the extreme measures I am being forced to take to make sure that information relative to everybody who might have been my wife’s lover is excluded from the archives. I am not worried about any repercussions on myself; the few years that remain for me to live are a trifle compared to the eternity I am used to measuring things against; and the person I really was has already been definitively established and consigned to the punch-cards.

If there is nothing that needs correcting in the world memory, the only thing left to do is to correct reality where it doesn’t agree with that memory. Just as I cancelled the existence of my wife’s lover from the punchcards, so I must cancel him from the world of the living. Which is why I am now pulling out my gun and pointing it at you, Müller, why I’m squeezing the trigger, killing you.

I must have arrived in the capital the day before a festival. They were building platforms in the squares, hanging up flags, ribbons, palmfronds. There was hammering everywhere.

‘The national festival?’ I asked the man behind the bar.

He pointed to the row of portraits behind him. ‘Our heads of state,’ he said. ‘It’s the festival of the heads of state, the leaders.’

I thought it might be the presentation of a newly elected government. ‘New?’ I asked.

Amid the banging of the hammers, loudspeakers being tested, the screeching of cranes lifting platforms, I was forced to keep things short if I was to be understood, and yell almost.

The man behind the bar shook his head: they weren’t new, they’d been around for a while.

I asked: ‘The anniversary of when they came to power?’

‘Something like that,’ explained a customer beside me. ‘The festival comes round periodically and it’s their turn.’

‘Their turn for what?’

‘To go on the platform.’

‘What platform? I’ve seen so many, one at every street corner.’

‘Each has his own platform. We have lots of leaders.’

‘And what do they do? Speak?’

‘No, speak, no.’

‘They go on the platform, and then what?’

‘What do you think they do? They wait a bit, while things are being prepared, then the ceremony is over in a couple of minutes.’

‘And you?’

‘We watch.’

There was a lot of coming and going in the bar. The carpenters and the workers unloading things from trucks to decorate the platforms—axes, blocks, baskets—stopped by to have a beer. Whenever I asked someone a question it was always someone else who answered.

‘It’s a sort of re-election, then? A confirmation of their jobs, you could say, their mandate?’

‘No, no,’ they corrected me, ‘you don’t understand? It’s the end. Their time is up.’

‘And so?’

‘So they stop being heads, living up there: and they fall down.’

‘So why do they go up on the platforms?’

‘With the platforms you can see better how the head falls, the jump it makes, cleanly cut, and how it ends up in the basket.’

I was beginning to understand, but I wasn’t quite sure. ‘The heads’ heads, you mean? The leaders’? In the baskets?’

They nodded. ‘Right. The beheading. That’s it. Beheading the heads.’

I’d only just arrived, I didn’t know anything about it, I hadn’t read anything in the papers.

‘Just like that, tomorrow, all of a sudden?’

‘When the day comes it comes,’ they said. ‘This time it falls midweek. There’s a holiday. Everything’s shut.’

An old man added, pontificating: ‘When the fruit is ripe you gather it, and a head you behead. You wouldn’t leave fruit to rot on the branches, would you?’

The carpenters had been getting on with their work: on some of the platforms they were erecting the scaffolding for grim guillotines; on others they were anchoring blocks for use with axes and placing comfortable hassocks beside (one of the assistants was testing the arrangement by putting his head on the block to check that the height was right); elsewhere people were setting up things that looked like butcher’s benches, with channels for the blood to run off. Waxed cloth was being stretched on the platform boards, and sponges were already in place to clean up any splashes. Everybody was working away enthusiastically; you could hear laughter and whistling.

‘So you’re happy? Did you hate them? Were they bad leaders?’

‘No, what gave you that idea?’ they exchanged looks of surprise. ‘They were good. Or rather, no better and no worse than anyone else. Well, you know what they’re like: heads of state, leaders, commanders… to get one of those jobs…’

‘Still,’ one of them said, ‘I liked this lot.’

‘Me too. And me,’ others agreed. ‘I never had anything against them.’

‘So aren’t you sad they’re killing them?’ I said.

‘What can you do? If someone agrees to be a leader he knows how he’ll end up. He could hardly expect to die in his bed!’

The others laughed. ‘That’d be a fine thing! Someone rules, commands, then, as if nothing had happened, stops and goes back home.’

Someone said: ‘Everybody would want to be leader then, I’m telling you! Even me, look, I’d be up for it, here I am!’

‘Me too, me too,’ lots of them said, laughing.

‘Well I wouldn’t,’ said one man with glasses. ‘Not on those terms. What would be the point?’

‘Right. There’d be no point in being boss on those terms,’ several of them agreed. ‘It’s one thing doing a job like that when you know what to expect, and quite another… but how could you do it otherwise?’

The man with the glasses, who must have been the best educated, explained: ‘Authority over others is indivisible from the right of those others to have you climb the scaffold and do away with you, one day in the not too distant future… What authority would a leader have without the aura of this destiny around him, if you couldn’t read it in his eyes, his sense of his end, for every second of his mandate? Civil institutions depend on this dual aspect of authority; no civilization has ever used any other system.’

‘And yet,’ I objected, ‘I could quote you cases…’

‘I mean: real civilization,’ insisted the man with glasses, ‘I’m not talking about barbarian interregnums, however long they may have lasted in the history of peoples.’

The pontificating old man, the one who’d talked about fruit on branches, was muttering something to himself. He exclaimed: ‘The head commands so long as it’s attached to the neck.’

‘What do you mean?’ the others asked. ‘Do you mean that if for example a leader went beyond his term and, just for the sake of argument, didn’t get his head cut off, he’d stay there ruling, his whole life long?’

‘That’s how things used to be,’ the old man agreed, ‘in the times before it was clear that whoever chose to be leader chose to be beheaded in the not too distant future. Those who had power hung on to it…’